Job Matching with Discus
26 July 2010
Using DISC to evaluate people and roles
What is it that makes one person perform exceptionally in a role, while someone else - even someone with the same qualifications and experience - fails to achieve? The answer, of course, lies in the personality: the natural features of a person's individual style will give them advantages in some roles, and lead to disadvantages in others.
Personality and Performance
The influence of the personality on performance is something that's well recognised in recruitment. Indeed, the established convention of interviewing candidates face-to-face is designed, in large part, to help build up a clear picture of each applicant's personal qualities.
Discus can match candidates against jobs, and jobs against candidates.
DISC is a system specifically designed to measure elements of the personality, and so it clearly has a part to play in helping to assess how well a given candidate will fit a new position. In Discus, we call this process Job Matching; the exercise of comparing what we know about a person's unique behavioural fingerprint against the ideal personality type for a job.
How the Job Match Works
The principles behind a Match like this are fairly straightforward. To create a Match, we first need to produce a Job Profile, a representation of the various facets that the job entails. For example, if we wanted to recruit a direct salesperson, we'd produce a Job Profile emphasising motivated, independent types of behaviour, whereas for an administrator, we'd set up a Job Profile describing a more organised and consistent type of approach.
Discus makes the creation of Job Profiles a simple matter, using its built-in Job Profiling technology. For example, you can simply answer a series of questions describing the needs of a given role, and it will automatically produce a Job Profile based on your answers. The Job Profiler also includes a suite of additional features for more advanced users: for example, it's possible to build a Job Profile based on the actual personality style of an existing strong performer.
Job Matching in Practice
Once we have a Job Profile, it's a simple matter to compare that profile against actual candidates, and assess each one according to how closely they match the Job Profile pattern, expressed as a simple percentage figure. An perfect match is represented by a 100% Match, while a completely unsuitable individual will score 0% (of course, in practice most Matches produce figures somewhere between these two extremes). Once we have this information, we can use it in two different ways:
- A Job Match takes an individual, and then searches and sorts different Job Profiles to find the best matches. This is an excellent way to uncover they types of role that suit a person best, and it can also an invaluable aid to career planning.
- A Candidate Match takes a given Job Profile, and searches for candidates who match that profile well. This is a powerful recruitment tool, and it allows Discus to take all the candidates for a job, and instantly rank them according to their behavioural suitability.
A detailed Job Match report identifies both strengths and training requirements for a role.
We can use a Job Match to do much more than just assess a candidate's basic suitability for a job. Because we have profiles that describe both the personal approach of the candidate, and the particular needs of the job, we can take the comparison further and look at the individual features and factors at work within the Match. From that, we can create a much more detailed view of the way a candidate will approach a role, of the situations where their particular strengths will be evident, and of those cases where some extra development or training might be needed.
The Role of the Job Match
It's important to stress that we're only looking at a part of the picture when we create a Match. We mentioned qualifications and experience earlier, and of course those are also vital ingredients of a recruitment decision, and there are many other factors to take into account, too.
What a Match does is to quantify the behavioural element of the process; it can't tell us in overall terms whether a person fits a job or not, but it can tell us specifically whether their behavioural style suits the role's particular needs. That gives you a key advantage in the process of reaching an effective recruitment decision.
See Job Matching in Action
You can try Discus and see Job Matching in action today. Visit the Discus page of this site for more information.
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